Ken Crangle

My 85 year-old father really wants to see more younger wargamers in the hobby. So, he enlisted me, his 59 year-old son! Here is Dad setting up his opening VM bombardment of Beatrice in “Dien Bien Phu 2nd Edition”. @KimKanger

@markherman54 @SpaceRumsfeld No worries at all. Omissions like this always get fixed in the re-print.

@SpaceRumsfeld @Crangle Nothing new here, I have been disappointing gamers for decades.

I would LOVE to see a Barbarossa game where demons fight archangels and druids

@markherman54 @SpaceRumsfeld @lady_valor_07 @SpaceRumsfeld has also been from Tucson to Tucumcari and Tehachipi to Tonapah.

@SpaceRumsfeld @lady_valor_07 You continue to frighten me

I've been to 5.

@SpaceRumsfeld @markherman54 @gmtgames Good too see another volume from Sid Sackson’s series hit the table. But, if you get locked out of the early mergers, you’ll have no chance. Accumulate shares in Festival or Worldwide. They offer the best mix of appreciation and capital preservation.

ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL!! Full campaign 4-player game of @markherman54 @gmtgames Fire in That One Lake You All Know About

@PaulPanosky Wonderful game! Happy to see it being played.

Ici, c'est la France! El camino a la independencia, de momento, va despacio.

Congrats @Wilson__Weber! I hope you have a fantastic career in the great sport of baseball.

@SpaceRumsfeld @markherman54 @gmtgames @consimworld @DonStoneCH Even Admiral Morrison’s son was on top of this.

Currently finishing up clipping and sorting my copy of @markherman54 @gmtgames Pacific War 2nd edition for transport to @consimworld Expo to play Breaking the Bismarcks Barrier with @Crangle and @DonStoneCH. Going through the rules, though, I am concerned that despite the vast amount of ocean covered, there do not appear to be rules for either Wide Sargasso Sea or Horse Latitudes. Further investigations are ongoing.

@SpaceRumsfeld @markherman54 @gmtgames @consimworld @DonStoneCH The omission of modifiers for the Horse Latitudes is especially egregious.

@PirizPepe @SpaceRumsfeld @jrastillero Here is an example of my staff being right: They would tell me that it’s not wise to engage in a protracted Twitter argument. Be well. Fun chatting with you!

@Crangle @SpaceRumsfeld @jrastillero I am also a longtime executive in a completely different kind of business and rather trust what the experts tell me and judge them by their results. You should try it and not waste other people’s time by pretending you know better just because you are above them ;-)

I’ve been trying to figure out what is real regarding the claims being made about the effect of tariffs on boardgame production. I’ve seen people say that the level of “quality and precision” needed to produce these games doesn’t exist anymore in the USA. So I pulled out some games to do a comparison: Jaws of Victory and Winter’s Victory by New England Simulations. These are giant, beautifully produced games with incredible colo(u)r palettes and high-quality printing and die-cutting. And they are printed in the USA. So I pulled out a couple comparison games from @gmtgames: Battle for Normandy and A World at War. These have similar volume of components, and also look great. However, they are no better in any aesthetic sense than the NES games. Glossy vs matte finish is a taste preference. (I prefer matte as it reduces glare.) These are printed in China. WV costs $200 ($190 with the current discount). AWaW costs $210. BfN costs $170. So there doesn’t seem to be any cost savings by printing in China. There is obviously no quality benefit to printing in China, as inspection showed. So what is the actual obstacle? Can someone explain exactly where the disconnect is? I’m honestly confused.

@PirizPepe @SpaceRumsfeld @jrastillero Hehe, some of my staff said the same thing from time-to-time. I was an executive in the largest printing business in the world for over 25 years.

@Crangle @SpaceRumsfeld @jrastillero Yes. There are many reasons for that. This kind of comment only shows your utter ignorance of the printing business

@PirizPepe @SpaceRumsfeld @jrastillero There is no reason that a printing machine in the USA can’t print more volume but a printing machine in China can.

@Crangle @SpaceRumsfeld @jrastillero You are basically oblivious to the fact that the problem if you are not printing in China is not only quality but also quantity

@PirizPepe @SpaceRumsfeld @jrastillero He is asking about the “quality and precision” of printing in the USA. Are you suggesting that a USA printer has to rest for five years before printing again? See how ridiculous that sounds?

@SpaceRumsfeld @Crangle @jrastillero Are you suggesting that all publishers become as small as NES and only publish a game every 5-10 years?

@fortcircle @6xW_a @SpaceRumsfeld Haha. Well, if you want to look at some of the newer MMP games, I’d be happy to send you my home address and you can swing by!

@Crangle @6xW_a @SpaceRumsfeld That's fair. I selected Angola because it is an outstanding game. If you would like to send me a newer MMP game, I am happy to send you my mailing address.

I’m gonna spell it out since I’m a very literal guy: there was an email sent by a US game publisher that said that the “quality and precision” of production required to make boardgames DOES NOT EXIST in the USA. This immediately raised my eyebrows, because multiple publishers, like @MultiManPub, @LegionWargames, and New England Simulations print outstanding quality wargames in the USA. But I thought, I’m nominally a man of science, let’s compare. So I made the post that I linked. None of the replies to this post addressed the fundamental question in anything other than the most tertiary way. It immediately went to how much the tariffs would cost, and people linked me to articles by this or that company complaining about tariffs, but didn’t explain why one company can print a gorgeous physical product in the USA and another has to use China or they will go out of business, yet the cost to me, the consumer, is the same. All of the relevant answers I got were from friends texting me directly, saying, “it’s possible that the margin that NES can run on is extremely low as they do not sell to distributors and do mostly a direct-mail business.” Ok, fine. What margin is that? What numbers are we talking about here. How much does it cost to print a game in Minnesota, as Legion does, and why does this work for them and not for GMT? Is it some fundamental difference in business model? Or is it inertia/unwillingness to move outside of a comfort zone? People throw around a lot of supposed numbers about what their costs would be if they had to switch to US printing, but there are games being printed RIGHT NOW by US companies in the US that are just as good as the games printed in China. Therefore, the statement that the “quality and precision” required to print a boardgame DOES NOT EXIST in the US is categorically false. 100% untrue. So tell me what the real problem is. But if you somehow can’t do that, at least don’t lie to me.

@6xW_a @SpaceRumsfeld I think Angola was printed a decade ago. Probably not the best game to use to compare the quality of games produced today

@SpaceRumsfeld That said, the email also states the following:

@jrastillero @SpaceRumsfeld Reading helps. Same price for the games produced in the USA, not 5X.

@SpaceRumsfeld Are you really comparing a publisher that has released 6 games in the last 28 years to GMT? My neighborhood carpenter also makes better furniture than IKEA, too bad he wants to charge 5 times as much and has a waiting list of over a year.

@markherman54 is making a legitimately good point here. Perhaps the most important point. Even the best businesses embarked product with an expectation of a ~25% tariff. But then China and the USA got in a pissing match and the tariff was cranked to 145% while the boats are/were in-transit.

@SpaceRumsfeld @FoundationDietz The point not being made is many of these games were already paid for at a discount so fulfilling them at the tariff costs could bankrupt a company. Better to not sell them than go out of business.

@SpaceRumsfeld The raw materials producer, the production and assembly partner, the distributor, the designer, the branded business (GMT in this example), the retailer, the end customer, etc., should all absorb some of the shock.

Responding to @SpaceRumsfeld’s legitimate question should probably avoid irrelevances like “Sean Hannity”. Part of managing any business, regardless of the objectives of the owners, is dealing with complex value chains and stochastic shocks. Risk sharing is a normal part of any business relationship. Every partner, from design to production to distribution to retail has power. B-school 101.

Thanks, that at least quantifies what things. But it assigns all the tariff cost to the game company. To paraphrase a friend, “US companies have a lot of leverage over their Chinese suppliers. No US company should absorb the full impact of the tariff. It should be at most 50%. And if the relationship is built in such a way that there is no risk-sharing between the partners, then the partnership is stupid.”

@SpaceRumsfeld @gmtgames @markherman54 The Trump tariff on R'lyeh has increased GMT’s price for this game to $666.

Thanks to some enterprising hacking and the FISA court, I was able to obtain some previews of unannounced historical consims upcoming from @gmtgames. This one from @markherman54 looks really interesting! I hope it comes with minis.

@antony1959 @SpaceRumsfeld I see now that @SpaceRumsfeld has asked the same question.

@antony1959 @SpaceRumsfeld @antony1959 Where do we find these “latest rules and clarifications”? There is no mention that OOS can attack in the “errata and clarifications” talk.consimworld.com/WebX?233@@.1de… nor is it mentioned in the e-rules (which btw, are difficult to find) drive.google.com/file/d/1W-HGPa…

So here is the deal: I convinced @Crangle to try out the Battles in the East system by @antony1959 because as you all know the East Front is the Best Front. I own both volumes (and have pledged the third one) so it’s not like I’m not VERY EXCITED to be playing this Panzergruppe Guderian lineage game. We settled on Tula 1941, which I thought was a fascinating situation to model because it covers the second half of Typhoon with Panzergruppe 2, which was a grinding endurance contest between exhausted armies (and the source of an infamous lament about SPI feedback questions in the designer’s note to Operation Typhoon) and thus the opposite of the cut-and-slash games of early Barbarossa or the hammer blow games of 1944-45. 1/-